Hang Neck Ridge

Award-Winning Adventure Thriller


Lovelorn-fueled historical fiction that spans the globe and the human spirit


Hang Neck Ridge chronicles the global journey of American Curtiss Bradley that takes readers on an inspiring adventure around the world and across the spectrum of the human spirit. At its heart, Hang Neck Ridge is a late coming-of-age story, but it’s also a thriller, a love story, and a vivid work of historical fiction spanning a decade and a half, and half the globe.

Introducing authentic, unique and diverse characters—all based on actual people—this work of fiction bridges cultures, generations and even life philosophies, with profound conflicts adding a mesmerizing blend of colors. Readers will never look at humanity, or their own culture, in quite the same way again.


Excerpt


The membrane of restraint that had always held Curtiss in as a player, that allowed him to be a careful, responsive session member but never take off, burst open that morning. The music flowed through him and from him, like unblocked Chi. The spirit of jazz spontaneity and genuine improvisation was upon him in that grungy basement bar for the first time in his life. He reached for the notes and they were, effortlessly, there: the right notes at precisely the right time.

The other players and the audience did their parts—the players played, the audience applauded and cried out—but they all did so with a new restraint of their own, all of them hanging back as if to give space to what all of them might have sensed was the most astounding, authentic performance of Curtiss’s life, when his body seemed to fade away and his raw emotions became one and the same with his instrument, manifesting in music all his sadness and joy, his pain and lust, fear and triumph, and rhapsodizing the attainment of his complete emancipation.

Curtiss was free.

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